"...
he charged that the Basel-based Anne Frank Fund has been
"hoarding money -- millions -- in
Switzerland."

New
York Daily News, September 20, 1998

"It's
easy to see why Otto Frank was anxious to keep the pages
from public view. They offer the harshest take yet seen
by Anne on her parents' marriage."

Journal
of Frank diary continues to be written

Competing
institutes locked in legal tussle

By Howard
KisselNew York Daily News

Few
books have the power to generate controversy half a century
after they are published. "The Diary of Anne Frank"
does.

The famed
diary of the Jewish teenager forced to hide from the Nazis
with her family in a cramped Amsterdam attic during the
Holocaust -- only to be betrayed and die in a concentration
camp -- has been an international best-seller,
required
reading in schools worldwide
and the inspiration for various books, plays and movies
since its original publication in 1947.

Anne
Frank had long been a touchstone of purity and
innocence, her image held up as an innocent celebrating the
human spirit. But as the diary has been buffeted by growing
controversies over the years, her image has changed
dramatically. She's seen now more as a complex adolescent,
willing to take a hard -- often critical -- look at love,
sex and the failings of her family.

And her only
work, the diary, is now at the center of the ugliest
disputes yet. Five never-before-published pages from the
diary have emerged. They have set off a round of
international accusations of withheld royalties and threats
of lawsuits between competing Anne Frank
institutes.

The man who
says he got the new pages from Anne's father, Otto
Frank, shortly before Frank's death in 1980, reportedly
had planned to auction off the pages at an event at the
National Holocaust Museum in Washington but canceled because
of the growing legal disputes.

A Dutch
newspaper, Het Parool in Amsterdam, is facing threats of a
suit from the Swiss-based Anne Frank Fund, which holds the
copyright on the diary, after the paper published the text
of three of the new pages.

And
a new book, "Anne Frank," by Austrian biographer Melissa
Müller, identifies a new player in the drama -- a
cleaning lady in the building where Anne and her family hid
-- as the informant who betrayed them to the
Nazis.

Those missing
five pages were originally to have appeared in the
Müller biography.

Meanwhile,
Doubleday, the New York-based publishing house that put out
a supposedly definitive edition of the book nearly a decade
ago, is eager to release yet another authorized edition but
can't because of the transatlantic fight over the new
pages.

At the center
of the latest war over the diary is Cor Suijk, 74,
who's affiliated with the Anne Frank Center USA. Suijk was
unavailable for comment. He reportedly received the diary
pages from Otto Frank, who asked him not to publish them
until after Frank and his second wife had died. The wife is
still alive, but her daughter authorized Sujik -- a friend
and confidant of Otto Frank -- to publish them.

IT'S
EASY to
see why Otto Frank was anxious to keep the pages from public
view. They offer the harshest take yet seen by Anne on her
parents' marriage.

"Father is
not in love," Anne writes. "He kisses (her mother) as he
kisses us. She loves him as she loves no other and it is
difficult to see this kind of love always
unanswered."

Frank had
withheld other sensitive pages on sex and family tensions
that had made their way to publication a decade ago in
what
was considered the definitive version.

It was Sujik
who released the pages to the Dutch newspaper, and in giving
them over he
charged that the Basel-based Anne Frank Fund has been
"hoarding money -- millions -- in Switzerland."

"It should be
put to a better purpose" than to be stashed away in a Swiss
bank, Sujik said.

A spokesman
for the Swiss group said the organization spends millions in
the United States every year, but declined
to name
the U.S. groups it funded. (To compound the confusion, there
is a third organization, the Anne Frank Foundation in
Holland, which manages the Amsterdam house where the Franks
hid.)

Müller's
book has already generated headlines of its own with its
revelations of a new identity for the Franks' betrayer.
Sujik had been contacted by Müller while she was
working on the new book, and he showed her the pages because
he felt she was sensitive to all the issues revolving around
the diary.

But
Elizabeth Riley, a spokesman for Metropolitan Books,
noted that the legal battles between Sujik and the Swiss
Anne Frank Fund made it impossible to use the pages in her
biography.

Anne has
never been a stranger to controversy.

When a
dramatization of her book, "The Diary of Anne Frank," opened
on Broadway in 1955, novelist Meyer Levin -- who had
been instrumental in getting the diary published in the US
in the first place -- charged that the play version by
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett made the
inhabitants of the secret annex too bland and failed to
identify them strongly enough as Jews.

Levin was
angry because Otto Frank had assured him that he would
support the dramatization Levin had written which stressed
the Jewishness of the Franks and their friends. Levin wrote
about his anger, disappointment and long, futile court
battle in his aptly titled nonfiction work
"Obsession."

A
YEAR AGO, when
a revised version of the play was about to open on Broadway,
controversy again raged.

The
distinguished novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote about the ways in
which the diary had been misused over the years. She noted,
for example, that in the German version there
were no references to exactly why Anne and her family had to
go into hiding.

After
surveying all the distortions to which the book had been
subjected, Ozick regretted that the book had ever been
published.

Why does the
diary continue to generate such heat?

It may stem
from the character of Anne Frank herself, suggests Thane
Rosenbaum, author of the novel "Elijah Visible" and the
literary editor of Tikkun, a magazine devoted to
contemporary Jewish issues.

He likens
readers' first exposure to Anne's tragic story as a loss of
"virginity" of sorts, a forced look at horror.

"She is
invariably our first encounter with atrocity," he observed,
"our first encounter with the Holocaust."

But the true
Anne -- a middle-class, assimilated Jewish girl hidden from
the emerging horror of the camps until she disappeared into
them -- "may not have been the right girl" to carry such
weighty historical and emotional baggage.

"She has
become this incredibly saintlike figure," he said, adding
that now, there's a sense that she was too much of a
diluted, assimilated figure to convey the emotional
complexity, the full horror of the Holocaust."